Or perhaps they would have advanced the cause of labor and prevented some of the exploitation from the ownership class. Depends on which side of the story you want to tell. The slur Luddite is a form of historical propaganda.

Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.

Reaganomics has never worked

> Reaganomics has never worked

Depends how you look at it.

Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.

> it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.

That would be "trickle up economics", though.

Sure, because it all trickles into their pockets.

problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just gives them an alternative income source (bonds/fixed income)

I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.

so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.

Yeah it's called wealth transfer and the vast majority is on the wrong end.

All of this crap has already been figured out by Silvio Gesell and his free economics ("Freiwirtschaft") movement before world war two. In fact, it has been figured out before Lenin got to power. Communists could have just stolen his ideas, pretended that they were their own and be done with capitalism.

Instead, we live in this absurd timeline where our communist "saviors" preferred losing against capitalists over achieving their stated goals. This tells us that in communism, the means are the goal and the proclaimed end goal is just an excuse to perform the means.

If communists genuinely wanted to help their people and they accept that they might not know how to get there, they would at least run hundreds to thousands of economic experiments, something that wouldn't be possible under capitalism, to find the methods that work. Instead, the self proclaimed saviors are inherently anti-reformist and against incremental change to improve society. They demand that all economic activity be under the control of the state and thereby destroy all possibility of performing economic experiments.

If the human race is wiped out by global warming I'm not so sure I would agree with this statement. Technology rarely fails to have downsides that are only discovered in hindsight IMO.

Sure, but would it have been better or worse for the Luddites?

For those who survived sure. For those at the time, I'm sure they would disagree

If you knew a little bit about history then you would know that the "Anti-Luddite" position is literally "shoot the unemployed if they strike".

Equivocating Luddites with backwards thinking is a way to cover up government violence. You're literally trying to misrepresent the Luddite position by implying that they had some sort of global plot to force the world to be worse and that they were rightfully stopped by the government when in reality they had some personal grievances about how they were treated and they took revenge against the owners of capital by vandalizing their capital.

You're trying to twist this into Luddites hating capital and machinery itself, which is factually wrong.